


Double Take

by Siria



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Future Fic, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-05
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-05-31 08:53:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6463825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Don't make me quote the very obvious <i>Star Wars</i> line at you," Ronan said.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Double Take

**Author's Note:**

  * For [trinityofone](https://archiveofourown.org/users/trinityofone/gifts).



"Oh, come on," Ronan said. "What exactly did you think was going to happen?"

Adam would have thought he was dreaming, but a minute ago he'd been standing in the cereal aisle of his local Food Lion, trying to find that one flavour of granola that Blue had taken a liking to. He'd been tired—a late night in the library followed by an early morning lab—but he hadn't been asleep. Now he was in a Cabeswater meadow, the fluorescent lights overhead replaced by starlight; the grass under his bare feet was sun-warm, and Ronan Lynch was smirking at him as if they'd last seen one another yesterday instead of years ago. 

"Well since you…" Adam had to pause and clear his throat. "Since you were stabbed through the stomach with a medieval longsword, I was pretty sure you'd died."

Adam had watched him die, in fact. He'd knelt down next to Ronan, where the bright, coppery mess of his blood was staining both the mud and the dull steel of Glendower's blade. It had ruined his one good pair of uniform pants, but Adam hadn't cared because not one of the cards had warned him that he would have to see the light fade from Ronan's eyes. 

"Don't make me quote the very obvious _Star Wars_ line at you," Ronan said, then rolled his eyes when Adam stared blankly at him. "The fuck, Parrish, where's your culture? I did die— _from a certain point of view_."

A sudden surge of bile bit, acidic, at the back of Adam's throat. "This is a bad dream," he told himself with all the conviction he could muster. He used every trick Blue's mom had ever told him to try to wake up: blinked rapidly, pinched the webbing between index finger and thumb as viciously as he could, tried to hold his breath. He had to be asleep. He must have found the cereal and bought it, gone back to the apartment, fallen asleep over his organic chem textbook having drunk too much of the foul-smelling, calming tea that Maura pressed on him every time he went back to Henrietta. 

"Why would that work?" Ronan asked. "I was always half of a bad dream even when I was alive. Wishing never got rid of me then, you can ask my fifth grade teacher about that." He was closer now, entirely naked in the moonlight and not the least bit self-conscious about it. Ronan had more tattoos than the last time Adam had seen him, or maybe it wasn't so much that Ronan had more as that the ones he'd already had had grown. They wrapped around his torso like armour, sent vines seeking down the strong length of his thighs. This close, Adam could see other changes, too: Ronan's shoulders had broadened, his hair grown long enough that it was threatening to curl. He wasn't a boy any more. 

"Greywaren." Adam couldn't look away from him now. 

"That's one name for me," Ronan said, and sounded almost cheerful about it. "Do you know how much you've been tormenting me?"

The urge to punch him was almost overwhelming, but Adam had no desire to be his father's son. "You son of a bitch, you've been dead for three years, we _buried_ you—"

"And then you kept dreaming about me anyway." It might have been a trick of Adam's eyes in the moonlight, but he could have sworn that the tattoos on Ronan's shoulders shifted, rearranging themselves. "Didn't you? Rubbing off against your mattress and wondering what it would have been like to suck me off in the BMW, or what would have happened if you'd bent me over a desk in Latin class and just gone for it, sweat and jizz everywhere and me begging for it and if you'd just risked—"

"Stop," Adam said, "stop it," but he wasn't brave and he didn't step away. 

"Because I would have liked it and you knew it. I would have let you, even before I knew I wanted it."

"Three years," Adam said, and he could hear desperation in his own voice, in the way he was losing all that hard-won control over his vowels. 

"I know," Ronan said, and now he was standing so that he could speak softly right into Adam's good ear. "And I know you, and I know you're going to want to repay the debt you owe me—"

Adam flinched and frowned, twisting to look Ronan in the eye. "What debt?"

"Or maybe it's what I owe you," Ronan said, shrugging. "Let's not get too deep into all that martyr shit, because I had enough of that the first time around, and every time you walk over a ley line it's like—"

"What?" Adam snapped, because he was angry and afraid and he'd spent the last two and a half years convincing himself that he was a normal college student who had nothing more to worry about than mid-terms and Pell grants. "Is it like I'm walking over your grave?"

Ronan's grin was feral. "Now he gets it."

"But you just said you're not—"

"I'm not, but I'm here." For the first time since Glendower had risen, Adam could hear Cabeswater again: the rustle of leaves in his deaf ear was startling, as shocking as the heat of Ronan's bare body so close to his that they were almost touching. The fine hairs on Adam's arms stood straight up. "And I'm awake all the time but I'm dreaming, too. I brought you here because you never stopped dreaming about me, and let me make this perfectly, crystal fucking clear, Parrish: I like it. Do it again."

And Adam was standing in the Food Lion cereal aisle, exhausted and light-headed and halfway to aroused. He fumbled the box of granola he was holding and then almost spilled his basket of groceries when he stooped to pick it up. A woman pushing a cart filled with produce and a babbling toddler gave him a dubious look as she passed by, and Adam couldn't blame her. He abandoned the basket right there, although he knew it was just making a nuisance that someone would be paid minimum wage to pick up. 

Hurrying out through the main doors, he dug his phone out of his coat pocket and called Blue. "Yes, they had it but—no, but—no, I'm not going to get some paper towels as well, would you listen to me? We need to go home this weekend. Yeah, I know we were going to go in two weeks, but this can't wait."

"What's going on?" Blue asked. Even over the tinny connection of his cheap phone, Adam could hear the way suspicion sharpened her voice. "Is it your mom?"

Adam hadn't seen his mother in over a year and couldn't bring himself to care about that any more. When he got to his car—the car that had once been Gansey's, the car that Adam had been left in his will—he paused for a moment, closing his eyes and clenching his fist around his car keys. The pain helped ground him, to remind him that there was a grey Charlottesville sky overhead and asphalt beneath his feet, not a field of stars and living grass. "No. We're going to get them back."

Blue didn't say anything while Adam unlocked the car and got in. He knew what she must be thinking—her thoughts jumping to Ronan and Gansey and then away, because it was impossible and terrible and no way to heal. _Unhealthy_ , Maura had murmured after the first six weeks; _pathetic_ , Orla had sighed at them after seven. They'd stopped actively looking for loopholes not long after that, but trust in Gansey had been a difficult habit to break. "Adam—" Blue said carefully. 

"If it's possible for a person to pull something out of a dream, then what if it was the other way around?"

"To… take a dream out of a person?" She sounded confused. 

Adam sighed and scrubbed a hand through his hair. "No, I'm not explaining this right." Trying to describe magic to someone was like trying to speak Latin using only American Sign Language. Words were a help with casting spells, just like rituals were, but at the heart of it, magic was nothing more than will that went right down to the marrow. "What if a Greywaren isn't just a person who can take a thing out of a dream, or pull something into a dream? What if a, a dream could dream itself into being, with a little bit of help?"

"This isn't just a delayed reaction to you taking that philosophy class last semester, is it?" Adam could hear the tamped-down hope in her voice. 

He had to concentrate very hard on not laughing, because he had the feeling that if he started, he'd never stop. "I was in the grocery store and then I was in Cabeswater, and now I'm back here. If someone ever reviews the store's security tape I'm going to end up on one of those caught-on-camera TV shows. I'm pretty sure he did that on purpose."

Blue made a wet, choking noise that was some kind of kin to a laugh. "Ronan, that _asshole_."

"Never could be considerate," Adam agreed. He was grinning now, smiling helplessly, because if Ronan was alive then so was Gansey, because if Ronan could find a way back to them then it was a sure bet that Richard Campbell Gansey III could, too. And if Ronan was alive, and Gansey was alive, Blue and Adam could bring them back. And if Adam could get Ronan back, he could see him in the sunshine, could kiss that smirking mouth and touch all that self-mottled skin, could tell Ronan all the important things that Adam had only told himself when it was far too late. If Ronan Lynch had seen fit to give Adam a prophetic vision in the middle of a suburban grocery store at noon on a rainy Thursday—well, Adam knew that a dream was about as difficult to kill as hope was.


End file.
